Google is Search, and Facebook is Social. We want to be everything in between, to live outside of the walled gardens, and create a new category we call Discovery, connecting people with things they may like and never knew existed, wherever they may be, and support the growth and success of the open web.
We are now a decade into Taboola’s journey and fulfilling our vision of becoming “The Recommender.” As of December of last year, we interact with nearly half the internet users around the world according to comScore Key Measure rankings.
Growing the open web means growing quality journalism and it means giving brands an alternative to search and social—a place they can scale in a safe and relevant way, next to credible editorial content.
Taboola’s year-over-year hyper-growth is due to a number of factors, including adoption of our Taboola Feed product, making a significant play in the $20 billion industry of video.
We are now placing brands’ videos in our feed, similar to how it appears in popular social sites, and the growth of our self service platform is at a run rate of over $100M less than a year since we started it.
The launch of our Data Marketplace has also fueled this growth, as well as our continued international expansion—we now have 13 offices around the world, including China, Korea, Australia, Germany, Brazil and many others.
As we’ve grown, it’s been incredible to see a similar value exchange happening between users, publishers and brands around “Discovery” all over the world including APAC, LATAM and EMEA.
All businesses, from small businesses to a big brands have a story that needs to be discovered—and this is a massive opportunity for quality journalism to carry their credibility, recommending stories, products and services to loyal audiences visiting their own sites, versus social and search.
Some numbers about our global reach
In the US, where we first launched Taboola, our audience reach has increased to 89% of all desktop users as of December 2017. According to comScore, this is an improvement of 17% year over year.
Many other markets are showing impressive growth, like the UK, which now reaches 86% of all desktop users, an improvement of 45% year over year.
Germany is increasing 75% year over year now reaching 63.5% of desktop users, and Brazil, which leads the content distribution category for the region reaching 64% of desktop users.
I am humbled by the amazing partners we have had the opportunity to work with in these markets. The NY Daily News, TMBI, The Gothamist, NASCAR, Boxed and eSalon in the US, Bauer Media Group, T-Online and Flare Audio in the UK, Blinkist and Goodgames Studios in Germany, ContaAzul in Brazil, and many others in these markets and more have helped us get here.
We Will Hire Over 400 Taboolars in 2018
We hire at least one person a day, and 150+ people apply every single day to join us, which is incredible, and we’re humbled by it.
We plan to grow to 1300 employees worldwide, hiring 400+ new employees by the end of the year. One hundred of these new Taboolars will join the engineering team, which now represents about 35% of the company’s workforce. In 2017, I’m proud to say that the Taboola engineering team in Israel was chosen to be the 6th most desirable place for engineers to work for, now having one of the largest AI/Deep-Learning teams in Israel.
This also includes our growing content review team, who review over a million pieces of content every month from 30 to 50 dedicated employees who are dedicated to brand safety.
Be an Optimist That Worries a Lot
I recently joined a small forum where Former Secretary of State Dr. Madeleine Albright spoke, and I related personally to something she said—she’s “an optimist that worries a lot.”
I’m optimistic about our industry’s incredible opportunity to make the open web, where 3 billion people spend a significant amount of their time, grow strong, be relevant and personalized for consumers.
We still have a lot of work to do. We’re building a place where quality journalism can attract the meaningful budgets that now live in walled gardens, where data is created but can’t leave. This can change, and I’m excited to be part of the solution to empower publishers with a platform to grow revenue, engagement and audience, and enable brands with advance targeting capabilities and scale in the open web.
Here’s to the next 10 years.